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Sunday, 18 January 2015

WAVE Calendar for iPhone and Android review

Here I am again with another calendar app review. This time it is a multi platform app, WAVE Calendar, that has both iPhone and Android versions. At this moment this is my favourite app. If you want to know why, please check this review based on iPhone version

As you know I am a fan of calendar apps and I have reviewed some of them (see my calendar category on this same blog). In the quest to find the perfect calendar app I came across with Wave Calendar and soon became my favourite. What does this app offer to stand on top? The different views and custom event creation screens.

Views

The app has four different views, typical in most of the calendar apps: day, week, month and search views. They can be accessed by touching the title bar. From this menu you can also go to today or to a selected date. Already here you can see a nice feature: if you select to go to a specific date, a customized date picker will pop up, much better that the awful date selector built into iOS by default.

For each of these views (except search view) there are always two options accessible by tapping on the upper right corner icon, a "vertical" and a "horizontal" mode, different in each of the views.

Day view

The day view vertical mode shows a three-day schedule timeline. I do not find this view so useful as I rather have the whole week view when I am scheduling events, and just three days is not that useful.

The horizontal mode shows the week day numbers on the upper part and the day schedule timeline on most of the screen. Useful to check details and move events within a day.

Week view

This is my favourite view of all. In week view you can have vertical week view that will show a timeline for the whole week. This is my favourite view to get full overview of your week at a glance.

The horizontal view is a typical paper agenda view with list of events per day.

Month view

Again here two options. The vertical will show the whole month with list of events per day.

The horizontal will show a calendar with dots indicating events and list of events of selected day in the lower part of the screen. You get even circles with pics of the attendees to meetings (if you are using Exchange or iCloud calendar scheduling)

I find here more useful the horizontal view as you can see how busy are your days and then select the day and see more details. The vertical view seems too crowded and not so useful in my opinion.

Search view

Useful to scroll continuously through all your events and to search for an specific event title or content.

Event scheduling and editing

This is another good thing about this app: it provides a customized event creation screen, much better than the standard iOS screen, specially when it comes to date and time pickers. If you do not like this custom pickers you can always disabled them from the settings menu.

You can also schedule an event by touching and holding your finger in a date or time to get the New event bubble and easily schedule an event. Dragging and dropping events is also supported in most of the views in order to reschedule events.

In the last version you can assign icons to the events to make them more easy to recognize. This is however an option and it can be disabled.

Regarding location, the app uses Yahoo! as source of addresses. This is not so good in my opinion as here, in Finland, there is no support for addresses, just town area names. But as the app is made for both iOS and Android, I understand they needed some service that would work on both paltforms. But honestly, I would have preferred, for instance, Google as a source of addresses. If you set the travel time on, you will get an indication in your calendar before the event, reserving the time you need to travel to the event address.

One more thing to mention, unless you disable it, there will be always a note signature attached to the event showing a link to Wave site. I recommend you to go to settings and disable it.

Left side menu

Online service

Accessing the side menu on the upper left corner, you can access to the online services. You need to sing up for WAVE service in order to access the "extra" features. At this moment there is only weather and time to destination features.

Weather will show a small icon with weather forecast for the next 4 days. I do not use this option as I prefer to use any other weather app that shows more detailed info, but this can be nice for your needs.

The time to destination can be useful if you add a location for the event. But as I mentioned before, it does not work so well here in Finland.

Pending invites

This are same Exchange invites that you might get in your iOS standard calendar app. You can reply from the app itself.

Settings

Besides the already mentioned options, there are some other ways to customize fonts, colours, etc. We have general options, for the editing of events, calendar views, default values, layout and for weather (if you have signed in to the service). I would have liked in the default value settings to be able to add a second default reminder (I usually have 1 hour and 15 min before an appointment)

Choose calendars

Also you can pick up which calendars to be shown and you can change the calendar default colour.

WAVE scheduler

I haven not bee testing this option myself. The company has a third app to schedule events with other WAVE users I understood, if you have signed in to their service.

Calendar Store

The only paid feature in the app are the subscription calendars. They are different kind of calendars for different needs: sprots, religious, festivities, etc. Subscription to each calendar cots 0.99 EUR, and it is a good way to support the app if you find it useful.

Summary

As a summary, here it is my comments:

The good

Fast

Great views

Clean user interface

Custom date and time pickers are a big improvement over standard iOS ones

The bad

No way to identify events set as tentative

No way to keep different mode as default per view (horizontal or vertical)

Animations Android-style can feel sometimes annoying

Not universal app for iPad

As the app is free of charge, there is no excuse to download it and give it a try! Android version in Google Play store from this link and iPhone version on the AppStore here. Enjoy!

2 comments:

Really liking the app - it looks great - but here's a few things I've noticed so far.- Set up was slow. I had to access the app numerous times over the course of a couple of hours until it showed all my available calendars which could be imported.- The app icon itself isn't dynamic. A lot of the time I will just use the Calendar.app to glance at without actually opening it just to get the date - not possible with Wave.- A few random crashes so far, but generally stable.- Despite removing an event from my desktop calendar approx 6 hours before it was due to happen, Wave still sent me notifications about the event. This indicates that sync is either slow/infrequent, or that it actually missed the fact I had removed an event.- Love the Week view and being able to see everything going on that week at a glance.

Great review and I'm now going to hide the default Calendar.app and replace it with Wave for a week and see how I get on.

Thanks for your comments Steve. I assume you are using iPhone version. iOS does not support icon changes besides the badge number. Maybe an option to show the date on the icon badge could work. Regarding the update of calendar, it uses internal iOS calendar, so it could be related to your settings (again, if you are using iOS version). I am not familiar with Android phones.I recommend you to send them any feedback through their webpage. They are really eager to answer and review new ideas for the app.Thanks for reading!